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Lytton Strachey was written by Henry Maximilian Beerbohm
(1872-1956), and was the Rede Lecture at Cambridge University (1943).

LYTTON STRACHEY

CAMBRIDGE

UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON: BENTLEY HOUSE

TORONTO BOMBAY CALCUTTA

MADRAS: MACMILLAN

All rights reserved

LYTTON STRACHEY

BY

MAX BEERBOHM

THE REDE LECTURE

1943

CAMBRIDGE

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

1943

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

LYTTON STRACHEY

One day in the springtime of 1912—a date not long ago in point
of time, but infinitely long ago in point of the changes that Europe
has suffered since then—I was lunching at the Savile Club. I had
been living for two years in Italy; and there were some faces new to
me. There was one that interested me very much; an emaciated face of
ivory whiteness, above a long square-cut auburn beard, and below a
head of very long sleek dark brown hair. The nose was nothing if not
aquiline, and Nature had chiselled it with great delicacy. The eyes,
behind a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, eyes of an inquirer and a
cogitator, were large and brown and luminous. The man to whom they
belonged must, I judged, though he sat stooping low down over his
table, be extremely tall. He wore a jacket of brown velveteen, a soft
shirt, and a dark red tie. I greatly wondered who he was. He looked
rather like one of the Twelve Apostles, and I decided that he
resembled especially the doubting one, Thomas, who was also called
Didymus. I learned from a friend who came in and joined me at my table
that he was one of the Stracheys; Lytton Strachey; a Cambridge man;
rather an authority on French literature: had written a book on French
Literature in some series or other; book said to be very good. "But
why," my friend asked, "should he dress like that?" Well, we members
of the Savile, Civil Servants, men of letters, clergymen, scientists,
doctors, and so on, were clad respectably, passably, decently, but no
more than that, And "Hang it all," I said, "why shouldn't he dress
like that, He's the best-dressed man in the room!"

Soon afterwards I returned to Italy, and his image faded from my mind.
Two years later I was back in England, but did not again see him, and
his image remained in abeyance. But it instantly and vividly recurred
to me when, in 1917, I was told by Desmond MacCarthy that a friend of
his, Lytton Strachey, was writing a book about some of the Victorians;
that these rather horrified the author, but that the book was sure to
be a good one; and that I, though I didn't share the horror, would be
sure to like it. A few months later I had the pleasure of meeting this
man at dinner in the house of a gifted lady; and though I had no
separate dialogue with him in the course of the meal, and, though he
seemed shy of general conversation, I was impressed by his mild
dignity and benign good manners. Early in the following spring
Desmond's prophecy that I would like the book was more than fulfilled.

I did far more than like it, I rejoiced in it. I can, if you will let
me, lay claim to one little modest negative virtue. I have always been
free from envy. In the year 1900 I had been considered a rather clever
and amusing young man, but I felt no pang whatsoever at finding myself
cut out at my own game by a sudden new-comer, named G. K. Chesterton,
who was obviously far more amusing than I, and obviously a man of
genius into the bargain. In 1918 I was young no longer, and I think I
amused people less than I had. I had subsided into sober irony. Well,
here was an ironist of an order far superior to mine. And here was a
delicately effulgent master, a perfect master, of English prose. And
in my joy there lurked no asp of satisfaction that here was not, in my
opinion, a man of genius. Very exquisite literary artists seldom are
men of genius. Genius tends to be careless in its strength. Genius is,
by the nature of it, always in rather a hurry. Genius can't be
bothered about perfection. Each of the four essays in Eminent
Victorians was, as a work of art, perfect.

I ventured to send, I could not forbear to send to Mr. Strachey a
reasoned letter of thanks and congratulations, by which he seemed to
be pleased. But it was not until the spring of 1921 that I saw him
again. I had reverted to Italy soon after the Armistice, and when he
mentioned to me in a letter that he was engaged upon the theme of
Queen Victoria, I immediately drew—for this time his image had
not lapsed from my mind's eye—a caricature of him in his royal
connexion. This drawing, with others of other people, I presently
brought with me to England, for exhibition; but I wished to verify
Strachey's image, and wrote to tell him so, and he was so good-natured
as to call on me at my hotel in order that I might professionally
stare at him. He was no longer velveteen-jacketed, he was dressed now
in a worldlier manner, which, I told him, seemed to me less
characteristic, and he willingly agreed that he should remain
velveteen-jacketed in my drawing. A few days later, his mother invited
me to luncheon. She was old and almost blind, but immensely vivacious,
and a very fount of wit, and with her I felt as though I were in the
presence of Mme. du Deffand; and I knew very surely from whom her son
derived some, at least, of the quality of his work.

Thenceforward, whenever I was in London, I met him pretty often, for
he was held in great request by many hostesses in that city. He
remained as shy of general talk as he had been when first I met him.
He had not inherited his mother's forthgivingness. He asserted himself
only when he was turned to and asked for his opinion. This he would
offer with great concision. He never enlarged on it. Dr. Jewett was a
little before my time, but the quality of his sayings, the rarity and
the brevity of them, their startlingness, and the small high voice in
which they were piped, were of course familiar to me by hearsay; and
Lytton Strachey's reminded me of them. Let me quote one instance. A
new book by another, a rather younger but more precocious writer of
great brilliance, my friend Philip Guedalla, had just been published.
Mr. Philip Morrell said he had just been reading it, and, turning to
Lytton Strachey, said, "He seems to be a sort of disciple of yours,
Lytton." "Oh," piped Lytton, "I thought I was a disciple of his? He
began before me." I say "piped" for that was what, in my hearing, he
always did. And I was much interested by the statement of Mr. Leonard
Woolf, who of course knew him very well and for a very long time, that
in intimate conversation he would speak in a deep strong voice. I
should like to have had the surprise of hearing that. I should like to
have known well a man whose work has given me such deep and abiding
pleasure. Some of you whom I am addressing in the University that
nurtured him may have known him very well indeed, and I wish you
were telling me about him instead of politely listening to my vague
personal impression of him. Perhaps you will take me aside and do so
when this lecture is over? But I fear you will be too tired. I shall
have to await the publication of his Life and Letters.

In his lifetime his work was cordially acclaimed. He was fortunate, I
think, in that the Great War (as we impresciently called it) had been
going on for two and a half years before the publication of Eminent
Victorians. In war, inevitably, rightly, voices are loud; and war,
even when all the omens are propitious to our own cause, is a tragic,
a painfully astringent theme. And thus the sound of a quiet voice
suddenly discoursing on well-remembered figures that had flourished in
halcyon years not long gone by was bound to give us something very
like the sense of relief that is ours in escaping from the din and
crush of a metropolis to some dear little old familiar countryside.
Strachey's publishers too were fortunate in that his book was promptly
praised in the course of a lecture on biography by a man of high
standing. English readers are ever instantly impressionable by Prime
Ministers. Mr. Gladstone had made the fortune of Robert Elsmere.
Quite recently Lord Baldwin did like service to the work of Mary Webb.
In the meantime Mr. Asquith had set the name of Lytton Strachey on the
lips of all men. And Strachey's future books were by way of being what
I believe is technically called "best sellers". But, as you know,
great acclaim brings great reaction. Anatole France (with whose spirit
Strachey had so much in common) was unassailably the Grand Old Man of
French literature, and his funeral, with all the statesmen and other
dignitaries of Paris and of the provinces following the bier along the
crowd-lined roads to Père Lachaise, was a great and moving
occasion, almost on the very morrow of which Paris began to ring with
denunciations and contempt of the departed. We are not so quick as the
Latin races, and are milder. We did not revile Tennyson or Swinburne,
Meredith or Henry James, directly after burial. But we did have fairly
prompt and fairly strong doubts about them, and were somewhat
embarrassed by the great impression they had made on us; and if we did
not succeed in forgetting them we spoke coldly of them. Of all great
modern writers Thomas Hardy is, I think, the only one to whom death
has not brought disparagement in the interval that elapses before the
justice of Time shows men in their true proportions. Well, Lytton
Strachey was not a great writer, not a great man, and not old enough
to have become a Grand Old Man. But his gifts and his repute amply
sufficed to ensure reaction against him very soon after the breath was
out of his body. I think it was Ben Jonson who spoke of "the backward
kick of the dull ass's hoof". That is not a pretty expression. But it
is neither silly nor vulgar. The vulgar term, "a debunker", the term
that the average writer or talker cursorily applies to Strachey, is
not only vulgar, it is also silly.

That he was not a hero-worshipper, or even a very gallant
heroine-worshipper, may be readily conceded. Also, he was perhaps not
a very warm-hearted man. (As to that, I really don't know.) Assuredly
he was not an artificer and purveyor of plaster saints or angels. He
was intensely concerned with the ramifications of human character, and
greatly amused by them. He had a very independent mind, and was an
egoist in so far as he liked finding things out for himself and using
his own judgement on what he found. Perfect justice is a divine
attribute. Lytton Strachey, being merely a human being, had it not. He
had, like the rest of us, imperfect sympathies. Great strength of
character, keen practical sense and efficiency, for example, did not
cause his heart to glow so much as one might wish they had. They
seemed rather to give him a slight chill. Though he recognised the
greatness of Florence Nightingale, the necessary grit that was at the
core of it rather jarred on him; while its absence from the character
of Sidney Herbert gave great tenderness to his portrait of that
statesman. Nor did his love of exercising his own judgement move him
to dissent from that of Purcell, the biographer of Cardinal Manning.
He was essentially, congenitally, a Newman man. Who among us isn't?
But I think his preference rather blinded him to the fair amount of
grit that was latent in the delicacy, the poetry of that great priest
and greater writer. In the character of Dr. Arnold there was such a
wealth of grit, and a strenuousness so terrific that one may rather
wonder how Strachey could bear to think of him and write of him. The
portrait fails, I think, because it is composed throughout in a vein
of sheer mockery. It is the only work of his that does not seek, does
not hesitate, does not penetrate, and is definitely unfair. It is the
only work of his that might, so far as it goes, justify the
application to him of that term which shall not again soil my lips and
afflict your ears.

The vein of mockery was very strong in him certainly, and constantly
asserted itself in his writings. A satirist he was not. Mockery is a
light and lambent, rather irresponsible thing. "On se moque de ce
qu'on aime" is a true saying. Strachey was always ready to mock what
he loved. In mockery there is no malice. In satire there may be plenty
of it. Pope was full of it. But he was rather an exception. Your
satirist is mostly a robust fellow, as was Aristophanes, as were
Juvenal and Swift; a fellow laying about him lustily, for the purpose
of hurting, of injuring people who, in his opinion, ought to be hurt
and injured. He may, like Aristophanes, have an abundant, a glorious
gift for mockery. But fundamentally he is grim. He is grimly concerned
with what he hates in the age to which he belongs. I do not remember
having found anywhere in the works of Lytton Strachey one passing
reference to any current event. He was quite definitely, and quite
impenitently, what in current jargon is called an escapist.

Need we be angry? It takes all kinds to make a world, or even to make
a national literature. Even for spirits less fastidious than
Strachey's, there is, even at the best of times, a great charm in the
past. Time, that sedulous artist, has been at work on it, selecting
and rejecting with great tact. The past is a work of art, free from
irrelevancies and loose ends. There are, for our vision, comparatively
few people in it, and all them are interesting people. The dullards
have all disappeared—all but those whose dullness was so
pronounced as to be in itself for us an amusing virtue. And in the
past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything
is settled. There's nothing to be done about it—nothing but to
contemplate it and blandly form theories about this or that aspect of
it. Strachey was by temperament an Eighteenth Century man. In the Age
of Reason, and of Wit too, he felt far more at home than in the
aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, and in the first fine careless
rapture of the Internal Combustion Engine. Even we, in spite of our
coarseness, deplore these great phenomena, and wish they had never
happened, and grieve that mankind will not in any foreseeable future
be able to shake them off and be quit of them. Strachey, like the good
Eighteenth Century Englishman that he was, had close contacts with
France. Indeed I feel that he was even more at ease in French than in
English literature and life. It was in that handbook on French
literature that he made his debut. In the volume entitled Books and
Characters (published in 1922) and in his last work, Portraits in
Miniature (1931), there is constant truancy to France. Racine,
Voltaire, Rousseau, Mme. de Sévigné, the Abbé
Morellet, Mme. du Deffand, the Président de Brosses—with
all of these he is oil terms of cosiest intimacy. To our native
Victorians he was rather in the relation of a visitor, an inquirer, an
inquisitor. I don't think he was—as Desmond MacCarthy had
gathered from him that he was—"horrified" by them. He disliked
the nineteenth century in comparison with its forerunner, but it
appealed to him far more than could the twentieth. Machinery, science
and applied science, had not yet got a really firm grip on England,
and moreover, in spite of one Reform Bill after another, government
was still oligarchic. Inequality flourished almost as much as ever.
Barriers were almost as ever high. The seeds of standardisation and of
mass-production had not been even sown. Life was full of salient
variety, of idiosyncrasy, of oddity, of character, character
untrammelled. Giles Lytton Strachey (I feel that I ought to have said
this at the outset) was born on March the first, 1880. And therefore,
when, in his maturity, he began to write about the Victorians he was
old enough to know his way about and among them, having been nurtured
among elders to whom they were familiar; and he was young enough to
feel far away from them, to be curious about them, to be wondering at
them greatly. The immediate past, the time that one almost belongs
to—almost but not quite—is peculiarly tantalising. Perhaps
Strachey was rather ashamed of the hold the Victorians had on him in
virtue of their proximity. And perhaps it was for this reason, and to
shake off these insidious rivals to his dear ones of the Eighteenth
Century, or perhaps it was merely in a sudden spirit of adventure,
that he plunged off into the court of Queen Elizabeth. Anyway it was a
brave thing to do. Elizabeth and Essex (published in 1928) is a
finely constructed work, but seems to me to be essentially guesswork.
A very robustious, slapdash writer might convince me that he was in
close touch with the souls of those beings whose actions and motives
are to me as mysterious as those of wild animals in an impenetrable
jungle. You rightly infer that I am not a Sixteenth Century man. And
I make so bold as to say "Neither was Lytton Strachey."

"A finely constructed work" I have said. But what work of Lytton
Strachey's, large or small, was not admirably firm in
structure?—totus, teres atque rotundus. I make no apology for
that tag: it is so often forgotten by gifted authors. Let us not
ignore the virtue of form in literature. It is the goblet for the
wine. Be the wine never so good, is not our enjoyment of it diminished
if the hospitable vintner pours it forth to be lapped up by us from
the ground with our tongues? Improvisation is the essence of good
talk. Heaven defend us from the talker who doles out things prepared
for us! But let heaven not less defend us from the beautifully
spontaneous writer who puts his trust in the inspiration of the
moment!—unless indeed he be a man of genius, of genius that
creates for him a rough but sufficing form in his wild career. No
writer need despise literary form as something artificial and unworthy
of him. Nature herself, with her flowers and her trees, with many of
her hills and streams and valleys, even with some of her human beings,
is an ardent and unashamed formalist. I would advise any young
writer—or any middle-aged or old one who may be needing
advice—to think out carefully, before he beguis his novel, or
biography, or essay, or what not, the shape that it should have. I
would say to him—quoting another excellent Horatian
tag—Respice finem. Let him before he begins know just how he
is going to end. And I would, at the risk of boring him, insist that
the beginning is not less important than the end, and that what comes
between them is no less important than they. In journalism, I have
often been told, the first sentence is the thing that matters most.
Grip the reader's attention, and all will be well. I am not sure that
this is so. Not long before the outbreak of war, when paper was very
plentiful, I saw in an evening paper a signed article about Karl Marx.
The first sentence was as follows: "Deep down in a grave at Highgate
the corpse of Karl Marx lies rotting." So far, so good. But what
followed was a quite mild and well-reasoned depreciation of that
writer's doctrines. The average reader, the man in the street, had
been gripped only to be disappointed. Well, literature is not read in
the street. Streets are not what they were when Thomas Macaulay would
walk from the Albany to Clapham Common reading Sophocles all the way.
Literature is read in homes only, and I fancy that in those quiet
surroundings the reader of it should at the outset be rather invited,
engaged, allured, than gripped. Indeed, I think you will find that in
all periods good poets or writers of prose have, whether in long or in
short works, made quiet beginnings. Quiet endings, too. The reader,
they have all instinctively felt, should be lifted gently out of
himself, and borne up and up, and along, and in due course be set down
gently, to remember his adventure.

Strachey, certainly, had this good instinct, and obeyed it always.
James Boswell, describing the conversation of members of The Club,
recorded the delight of watching Edmund Burke "winding himself like a
serpent into his subject". Even so was Strachey wont to wind himself
into his subject—and eventually out of it—suavely. Let me
quote, as an instance, the opening and the closing words of the essay
on the Abbé Morellet (a disciple of Diderot, a favoured friend
of Madame Helvétius, and at one time a quite well-treated
prisoner in the Bastille):

"Talleyrand once remarked that only those who had lived inFrance before the Revolution had really experienced ladouceur de vivre. The Abbé Morellet would have agreed withhim. Born in 1727 at Lyons, the son of a small papermerchant, how was it possible, in that age of caste andprivilege, that André Morellet should have known anything oflife but what was hard, dull, and insignificant?"

Then comes the tale of the Abbé's career, beautifully told, and
concluding with this picture of his old age, when he used to sit dozing
by the fire in the drawing-room of young Madame de Rémusat:

"He was treated with great respect by everybody; even the FirstConsul was flattering; even the Emperor was polite, and made him aSenator. Then the Emperor disappeared, and a Bourbon ruled on thethrone of his fathers. With that tenacity of life which seems tohave been the portion of the creatures of the eighteenth century,Morellet continued in this world until his ninety-second year. Butthis world was no longer what it used to be: something had gonewrong. Those agitations, those arrangements and rearrangements,they seemed hardly worth attending to. One might as well doze.All his young friends were very kind certainly, but did theyunderstand? How could they? What had been their experienceof life? As for him, ah! he had listened to Diderot—usedto sit for hours talking in the Tuileries Gardens with D'Alembertand Mademoiselle de Lespinasse—mentioned by Voltaire—spenthalf a life-time at Auteuil with dear Madame Helvétius—imprisonedin the Bastille...he nodded. Yes! He had known la douceur de vivre."

Exquisitely beautiful, that diminuendo, is it not? And as tender as it
is profound. I have said that Strachey was not, for aught I knew, a
warm-hearted man. A tender-hearted man he assuredly was.

As biographer, he had, besides his gift for construction, the
advantage of a splendid gift for narrative. He was a masterly teller
of tales, long or short, tragic or comic. He could, as it were, see
the thing he had to tell, see the people concerned in it, see them
outwardly and inwardly, and make us share gratefully his vision. Who
could have made so much as he of such things as the adventures of "the
boy Jones" in Buckingham Palace, of the inception and the building of
the Albert Memorial, of Mr. Gorham's vicissitudes in the Court of
Arches and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council? As the finest
example of his narrative gift—I had almost said his dramatic
gift—I would choose perhaps his treatment of what led to the
tragedy of the dereliction and death of General Gordon. The tremendous
tale, charged with the strangely diverse characters of the eminent men
involved in it—Gladstone, Hartington, Baring, and Gordon
himself—is told with the subtlest strength, oscillating
steadily, with the swing of a pendulum, between Downing Street and the
Soudan. For a while we are in the one place, then we are with equal
vividness in the other, alternately, repeatedly; and great is the
cumulative effect of this prolonged strophe and antistrophe. To those
of you who are, as I am, fond of thrills, but have never read these
pages, I would say earnestly, "Read these pages."

The element of criticism was implicit, and often explicit, in all
Lytton Strachey's biographical work. From time to time he indulged in
criticism undiluted. As a literary critic alone he would have been
worthy to be remembered. The best kind of critic—the helpfully
interpretative, the almost creative critic—is very passive
before he becomes active. Such an one was Strachey. With an intellect
of steely quality there was combined in him a deep sensibility and
receptivity. He had felt before he thought. And two at least of his
critical works—his long essay on Racine, and his Leslie Stephen
Lecture on Pope—happened to be of cardinal, of crucial effect.
Racine had never had high repute upon these shores; and the Romantic
Movement had reduced Pope to a small shadow among our own poets. It
was Strachey's silver trumpet that woke the young men of two decades
ago to high appreciation of those two worthies. And by the way,
literature apart, aren't there in the Elysian Fields two other
worthies who have reason to be grateful to the supposed
iconoclast?—Queen Victoria, and the Prince Consort? The Prince
in his life-time had never been popular; and after Sir Theodore
Martin's saccharine biography he had become a veritable mock. I never
heard a kind word for him. The Queen, who in my childhood and youth
had been not only revered but worshipped, was, soon after her death,
no longer in public favour. Her faults had become known, and her
virtues were unheeded. This is not so now; and is not so by reason of
Lytton Strachey's fully judicial presentment of her with all the
faults over which her virtues so very much preponderated. And it is,
by the same token, through him that we know the Prince not as just
dreadfully admirable, but as some one to be loved and to be sorry for.

But after all—and perhaps you are saying "Oh, if only it were
all!"—it is as a writer, in the strict sense, as a user of that
very beautiful medium, the English language, that I would especially
extol Lytton Strachey. There is such a word as prosaist. It is a
word that we never use; whereas prosateur is not seldom on the lips
of Frenchmen, and is spoken in a very serious tone, a tone as serious
as that in which we use the word poet. Frenchmen are keenly aware of
the virtues of prose, and we, not being so, have accepted the idea
that French prose is superior to ours. Undoubtedly, the general level
of it is so. The average Frenchman writes better prose than the
average Englishman. His medium is a language whose greatly prevailing
Latinity makes it far more lucid than ours. It is, moreover, a
language that has been by authority kept free from corruption. We have
had no Richelieu, and if we had we would not, in our sturdy
independence, have bowed down to the mandarins of his creation. Our
prosaists, to achieve lucidity and euphony, have to do a good deal of
filtration on the way. I remember Lytton Strachey once said to me, in
reference to this need, that he wished he were a Frenchman, writing in
French. I rather shocked him by saying "Oh, any fool can write good
French prose." But truth is in itself so good a thing that one may be
pardoned for exaggerating it every now and then. Good English is, I am
sure, far less easy to write than good French; and "pour être
difficile la tâche n'est que plus glorieuse"; and difficulties
surmounted (though only had they not been surmounted would the reader
be conscious of them) do somehow, I am convinced, enrich the texture
of good writing. The English language, being part Latin, part Saxon,
is, in my rough insular opinion, an even finer medium than the French
one. Latin is, one might say, its bony structure, Saxon its flesh and
blood. And of these two Latin is perhaps the more important. A
skeleton by itself is a noble thing, whereas an inchoate mass of flesh
and blood is not. A writer who has not in boyhood been well-grounded
in Latin is at a grievous disadvantage. However keen a natural
instinct he may have for writing, he will be diffuse, he will be
sloppy, as was, for example, D.H. Lawrence, whose prose was so
dangerous a model for young admirers of his philosophy. The Latin
element, on the other hand, should not have too strong a hold on a
writer, leading him to over-great austerity and nobility, even to
aridity, as happened so often in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. In the best writing neither element prevails. The two merge
indistinguishably in each other.

To single Lytton Strachey out as a born writer would be to offend a
great number of people. For there is a very widespread and comfortable
belief that we are all of us born writers. Not long ago I heard that
agile and mellifluous quodlibetarian, Dr. Joad, saying in answer to a
questioner who wanted to write good letters, that anybody could write
good letters: one had but to think out clearly what one wanted to say,
and then set it down in the simplest terms. And a few weeks later,
when the writing of books was under discussion, he said that the
writers who thought most about how they should write were the hardest
to read; and again he seemed to think lucidity all-sufficing. I admit
that Herbert Spencer had also, many years ago, seemed to think so, and
said so. But I maintain that had he not thought so, had Nature at the
outset endowed him fully with a gift for writing, we should all of us
be now reading him with greater zest and constancy than we do. A true
gift for writing, though in spite of the telephone we all do still
write letters sometimes, and though authors of books are more than
ever numerous, is not widely bestowed. Nor is a true gift for
painting, or for playing the violin; and of that we are somehow aware.
We do not say to a violinist "Just think out clearly what you want to
express and then, go straight ahead. Never mind how you handle your
bow," nor to a painter, "Got your subject and your scheme of colour in
your head all right, eh? Then don't bother about how you lay your
paints on, dear old boy." Let us not make similar remarks to writers.
I am willing to concede that in the eighteen-nineties perhaps rather
too much thought was given to manner in literature. The young men of
that decade were perhaps over-influenced by the example of such elders
as Walter Pater and Robert Louis Stevenson, over-fond of unusual words
and peculiar cadences. Preciosity is a fault on the right side; but it
is a fault. A venial one? Yes, in Pater, the essayist. But not in
Stevenson, the novelist, when he was telling a straightforward story
and wishing to give the reader an illusion of reality. From such books
as Treasure Island and The Master of Ballantrae I have never for
one moment had that illusion, have been too acutely and delightedly
conscious of the technical graces and ingenuities of the author. When
Stevenson did not aim at realism, and was entirely oblivious of Sir
Walter Scott, and was giving rein to his own riotous sense of fantasy,
as in The New Arabian Nights, or The Dynamiter, or The Wrong
Box, the jewelled elaboration of the manner becomes an integral part
of the fun, and keeps us laughing the more irresistibly and the more
loudly. These books are, I think, far and away his best—the most
characteristic of himself, of his true and magical self. I have always
regretted that Maurice Hewlett, one of the lights of the 'nineties and
of later years, was not a humourist and wished to illude us with his
tales; for his preciosity was fatal to his wish. Besides, it was a
robust preciosity; and that is unnatural, is a contradiction in terms.

I conceive that had Lytton Strachey been a young man in those
'nineties, and not the merely growing boy that he was in most of them,
he might have inclined to preciosity. Of this you will find no jot in
his prose. His manner, though classical, is entirely natural, and
rather shy. He makes no attempt to dazzle. He is not even afraid of
clichés. He can be very homely. When he is narrating something
humdrum he is quite congruously pedestrian; though even then
felicities are apt to come shining forth by the way; as, for instance,
in his account of how the young Queen Victoria's popularity was
restored by the happiness of her marriage.

"The middle classes, in particular, were pleased. They liked alove-match; they liked a household in which they seemed to seereflected as in some resplendent looking-glass, the ideal image ofthe very lives they lived themselves. Their own existences, lessexalted, but oh! so soothingly similar, acquired an addedexcellence, an added succulence, from the early hours, theregularity, the plain tuckers, the round games, the roast beef andYorkshire pudding of Osborne."

His manner is infinitely flexible, in accord to every variation of
whatever his theme may be. Consider the differences between his ways
of writing about Lord Melbourne, Lord Palmerston, Mr. Disraeli, and
Mr. Gladstone. His manner seems to bring us into the very presence of
these widely disparate Premiers. Note the mellow and leisurely
benignity of the cadences in which he writes of Lord
Melbourne—"the autumn rose," as he called him. Note the sharp
brisk straightforward buoyancy of the writing whenever Lord Palmerston
appears; and the elaborate Oriental richness of manner when Mr.
Disraeli is on the scene. And does not all the subtlety of Mr.
Gladstone confront us when we are asked, "What, then, was the truth?
In the physical universe there are no chimeras. But man is more
various than nature; was Mr. Gladstone perhaps a chimera of the
spirit? Did his very essence lie in the confusion of incompatibles?
His very essence? It eludes the hand that grasps it. One is baffled,
as his political opponents were fifty years ago. The soft serpent
coils harden into quick strength that has vanished, leaving only
emptiness and perplexity behind." I can't help repeating to you the
first words of that last sentence. "The soft serpent coils harden into
quick strength that has vanished." Was ever speed so well suggested as
in those eleven words?—words of a born writer, and a taker, we
may be sure, of infinite pains.

If I were asked what seemed to me the paramount quality of Lytton
Strachey's prose, I should reply, in one word, Beauty. That is perhaps
a rather old-fashioned word, a word jarring to young writers, and to
young painters or musicians, and by them associated with folly, with
vanity and frivolity. To me it is still a noble word, and I fancy it
will some day come back into fashion. I believe that the quality it
connotes is essential to all the arts. The stress and strain, the
uncertainty of life in the past thirty years has not, I think, been
favourable to the arts, though in those years a great deal of
admirable work has of course been done (mostly, alas, by men of
maturish years). Nor do I suppose that in my time, or until long after
my time, will very propitious conditions supervene. There is a spate
of planning for the future of many things. Perhaps some people are at
this moment strenuously planning for the future of the arts. But I
doubt whether in the equalitarian era for which we are
heading—the era in which we shall have built Jerusalem on
England's smooth and asphalt land—the art of literature, which
throve so finely and so continuously from Elizabethan to
paulo-post-Victorian days, will have a wonderful renascence. We are
told on high authority, from both sides of the Atlantic, that the
present century is to be the Century of the Common Man. We are all of
us to go down on our knees and clasp our hands and raise our eyes and
worship the Common Man. I am not a learned theologian, but I think I
am right in saying that this religion has at least the hall-mark of
novelty—has never before been propagated, even in the East, from
which so many religions have sprung. Well, I am an old man, and old
men are not ready converts to new religions. This one does not stir my
soul. I take some comfort in the fact that its propagators do not seek
to bind us to it for ever. "This," they say, "is to be the Century
of the Common Man." I like to think that on the morning of January the
first, in the year 2000, mankind will be free to unclasp its hands and
rise from its knees and look about it for some other, and perhaps more
rational, form of faith. I like also to think that in the meantime, in
the great pale platitude of the meantime, there will be, as hitherto,
a few discriminating readers of things written in past times; people
likely to read, and likely to revel in, the works of Lytton Strachey.
After all, it is always by the devotion of a few only that good books
become classics.

I don't know whether it is "in order" to dedicate a Rede Lecture to
anybody. If it is, I would like to dedicate this one to the memory of
Lytton Strachey. I am always very proud that he dedicated one of his
books, his last one, to me. Forgive me for boasting that he said "with
gratitude and admiration." To him I dedicate this lecture with far
greater gratitude than ever he can have felt to me, and with far
deeper admiration than ever he can have had for anything of mine.